Why I quit working for Uncle Sam

In late 2013, I decided to quit my job at the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) of the US Department of Labor (DOL).   I’m writing about my experience and my reasons for leaving because I think that doing so reveals some possibilities about what I might do in the future. In detailing my experience here, I think I’ve also explained what some of the advantages and disadvantages of Federal employment are.

Desperation leads to stable employment

I started to work for WHD in July 2009 as a Wage Hour Investigator, sometimes abbreviated as “WHI.” The country was in an economic depression, and I was in turmoil. Within the six months prior to accepting my job at WHD, I had ended an abusive long-term relationship and graduated with a master’s degree in sociology. I had been obliged to move back into my parents’ home in metropolitan Atlanta, where my father was on his fourth year out of five of his slow death by cancer.

I took the job as a Wage and Hour Investigator principally because it was the first full-time permanent job offered me within a four hour drive of my ailing parent. I had been offered other jobs that I felt more excited about. Notably, an Outward Bound school offered me a job as their kitchen director. But my parents, worried not only about my availability as their sole caregiver but also about my economic stability, persuaded me I should get something full-time and permanent.

The work of a petty bureaucrat is never through

As a WHI, I investigated employers to see if they had complied with the laws the agency enforced. Most of these laws require that employers pay their employees certain minimum amounts; amongst them features prominently the basic Federal minimum wage and overtime law, the Fair Labor Standards Act. Investigations involved site visits, interviews with employees, and conferences with employers. It was not unlike a sales job. My role was to find out how an employer had screwed up, sell them on not screwing up in the future, and convince them to pay the employees they’d stiffed.

I believed in this work passionately. So many workers are paid less than they are owed. On the balance, many employers are unfairly targeted for sanction, despite trying to do the right thing. And I liked the great variety of businesses I became acquainted with and people I met.

A complaint about travel and terror

I didn’t like constantly having to travel. From July 2009 until December 2010, I was out of town about half the time for site visits or training. Even the in-town or in-state travel annoyed me because they required me to use my personal vehicle. I would have preferred to start my days at an office, and drive my employer’s car to any job-related appointments. Traveling for work was especially stressful because I spent many of my weekends visiting my terminally-ill parent in Atlanta.

There were complex interoffice dynamics that made learning how to do the job more difficult. The District Director, M, who hired me to work out of Nashville, and who herself worked out of Nashville, had a conflict with the subordinate manager who worked out of Memphis, N. M thought that N was incompetent, partially for reasons I agree with, but also partially because M was a white racist and N is black. After a month of me working out of the Nashville office without having a supervisor at all, I was assigned the manager from Memphis. Because of N and M’s conflict, I became the target of the Memphis woman’s wrath, which was famous in the agency as a rabid and irrational force.

For months, I lived in fear of the next abusive phone call I’d get from Memphis. When I first met the woman in person, she said “you think you’re too good for us, but we’re gonna fix that.” I never did understand why N’s mistreated me, and instead just accepted her formally positive reviews of my performance with gratitude. I needed a job.

My terror lasted for about eighteen months, whereupon the District Director that hired me, M, was asked to retire. Her replacement, the subordinate manager from Knoxville, S, had been involved in the parts of M’s conflict with the Memphis woman, N, that did not relate to race. Both S from Knoxville and N from Memphis competed for the District Director job, but S was hired. As part of an EEO settlement, perhaps, or just because S and N didn’t fully appreciate each other, the regional management separated Memphis from the rest of Tennessee, and joined it with another administrative district. This meant that I would no longer be supervised by N.

Finally, a job I can do well– over and over and over and over and over

One of the first things that S did was ask me if I’d like to transfer to being a technician (WHT) in the office. I was very pleased by this. While it wasn’t a promotion, it addressed some of the difficulties that had kept me under a constant strain for a year and a half. It was at about this time that my dad did finally die. The switch away from travel was very welcome because it allowed me to handle family business without being away from home for work so often. I could show up every day in the same place. I was given a new supervisor, P, whom I liked a lot.

For the next three years, I answered questions about the laws that our agency enforced, took complaints, did investigative work for technicians and the solicitor’s office, convinced employers to do self-audits, helped my managers with writing reports, and negotiated with employers for the money owed from self-audits. I worked in a windowless room for forty hours a week, every week, 8:30-5 every day. All I had to remember was to get to my windowless cell by 8:30AM on Monday, and I was golden.

Why I quit

Federal employment and the gilded cage

Federal employees have great job security because they are protected from arbitrary firing or transfer. They are much more strongly protected against discrimination on race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, linguistic ability, and age than are their private-sector counterparts. Federal jobs are specialized, and the pace of change is slow.  A person who lands a job with Uncle Sam may be able to do that job for an entire career without having to learn an entirely new role or set of skills. Finally, and importantly, Federal employment rules try to make it so  people are hired, promoted, fired, or retained based on their documented experience instead of their personal connections.

You can get a job without anyone ever meeting you in person; they will speak to you via phone and look over your application. Once employed at a job, you may never have to learn to do anything new ever again. You can probably keep your position for the rest of your career, if you want. And that applies equally to you regardless of your race, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, marital status, religion, gender, or the like. It’s no accident that the Federal workforce is one of the most diverse in the country.

Unfortunately, that which makes Federal employment so appealing also causes problems. There are employees who hang on to a Federal job because they wouldn’t be hired anyplace else. The hiring system deemphasizes social skills and likability. While the majority of managers are competent, some people without social skills or other possibilities for employment end up becoming managers simply because they outlast everyone else. For while merit counts, so does endurance. I have been known to comment bitterly that while it was nice to have job protections and merit-based hiring as a Federal employee, these protections applied to other people, too.

Managers in the system know that it may take years to fire someone, so usually they don’t bother. Instead, managers have to apply inane rules to everyone to make up for the stupidity of the few. And since promotion is based on a combination of experience and endurance, the rules for promotion are fairly rigid. Since everyone needs to be judged and evaluated equitably, people only do the work of the position they’ve attained. There’s rarely such a thing as slowly shifting to an entirely different role over time by merely taking on new responsibilities, or showing initiative.

The golden cage and I

In January 2014, I worked my last day at the Department of Labor. There were a number of reasons for leaving such a steady gig. The first was the lack of a promotional path for someone in the position I held. There seemed to be no way out of being a WHT. This meant that if I continued to work at WHD/DOL, my duties forever would feature explaining to aggrieved people why their Federal government would not help them with their employment dispute, a key technician responsibility (“complaint screening”) that tended to dispirit me.

In order to be promoted out of the technician role, I would have been obliged to become an investigator again because of how rigidly the promotion rules were defined. Even though my work as an investigator had been at least merely competent, I never became especially skilled at it.  I already held the highest pay grade (GS-9) of a technician. Becoming a manager or nonmanagerial administrator in the agency would have required a significant time working as an investigator.

Secondly, after almost four years at the helm, S retired from her post as District Director. As previously mentioned, S was the subordinate manager from Knoxville who won out over N for the District Director job, which was held by M when I was first hired.  In the fall of 2013, N, who had spent a year and a half terrorizing me, was appointed District Director. She would henceforth be supervisor of all twenty-odd of us who worked in Tennessee.

For whatever their merits may have been, I suspect that M, the casual racist, and N, the casually spiteful, both benefitted from promotion rules that valued years of endurance in the system as much as social skills or being likable. If I stayed, I knew that N, being unable to fire employees she did not like, would merely harass some of us into wanting to quit, as indeed I had seen her do over time with about half a dozen other workers.

Finally, and most importantly, I left because even the security of Federal employment had become stultifying and brutal, a gilded cage that did not promise to make me into the best version of myself. If I were to have stayed, I could have chosen to do well or poorly, but the outcome would have been similar. I never would have been obliged to learn anything new if I didn’t want to. Even if I became a relatively useless employee, I could have kept in my windowless cell, and the checks would have kept coming.

I predicted that one day I’d realize that I could do nothing else. I would find that I had no skills except for the ones needed to work for the Nashville District Office of the Wage and Hour Division. There would be no other employer anywhere who would hire me to explain such a specific set of laws, and to explain, at least to most callers, why there was no help to be found for their difficulty.  Then, much as my employer would have no choice to get rid of me, I would have no choice as to whether I would stay.

My father, a lifetime Federal employee, joked that before Uncle Sam could to stop sending a dead employee a check, the servicing personnel officer was required to check the deceased’s pulse on two separate occasions, separated by at least one pay period. Though he spoke in jest, I did not want to slowly become a person whose contributions were so unnoticed that I got paid whether I made them or not.

Conclusion: What I want in the future

When I left, I told everyone I was going to become a computer programmer. While I do not know if being a computer programmer is what I’ll do,  contrasting computer programming to my former situation at WHD illustrates my hopes for a different sort of future. The same is true of any well-defined occupation with broad demand, such as “diesel mechanic,” “nurse,” or “social worker,”

I hope I will have a broadly transferable set of skills for which there are many employers. There is only one employer in the entire world that hires people to enforce the US minimum wage and overtime law, and that’s the Wage and Hour Division of the US Department of Labor. A person might be able to use the same knowledge to work for a lawyer, or a human resources department, but the fact is that this expertise is so specialized as to be almost unmarketable. There are former WHIs who succeed at marketing themselves outside of the agency, but these are rare.

By contrast, I’m looking to do work that many different employers need done. If the new supervisor is insufferable, if they install hideous carpet, if they demand an objectionable human sacrifice be performed, the competent computer programmer will find work down the street working for a different boss and company.

I hope that people will pay me based on the work I do, instead of based on some rule. And while I don’t want to be treated arbitrarily, I also don’t want to spend time with people who find me unpleasant– just because of a rule that says I can’t be fired. I don’t want to be bound to an organization or employees who are only tolerating me and each other because of some rule.

If I ever work for Uncle Sam again, I will make sure that I work in an office or agency where there are a lot of different jobs I can train to do. I’ll try to get a position that trains me in skills that can be used government wide, like being a contracting officer. I’ve also considered getting a permanent seasonal (six month) gig that would allow me the security of Federal employment while still giving me the risks and opportunity of other adventures.

All in all, I want my future success to be a result of being liked, and really good at a highly-transferable skill.  I want any routine to be tempered with challenge, variety, risk, and new opportunity. Most importantly, I never want to be trapped again. If an employer terrorizes me, I want to be able to leave. There are bullies in the world, but I do not want to be in an economic situation ever again that requires me to work for one.